I’m late posting this year! :chair:
I’ve really enjoyed reading this as ever. Always impressive what people have been up to! I particularly love that one of Haydn’s “spankings” was not having done quite as many 8s as Steve Mac. :
Hold tight everyone who’s had mental/ physical/ family issues.
Last year I had all sorts of stories from the Wild West, this year, while I’ve had loads of fun climbing and improved massively I hardly left the Peak. My life’s had a feeling of limbo for more than five years with my accident and recovery, the pandemic, my other half’s accident and recovery and my parents both being at the end of their lives and theoretically about to check out any moment. This year, as I mentioned in the aims thread, that was kicked up a notch by twiddling our thumbs all year waiting for expensive legal house-move stuff to be resolved, not conducive to making exciting plans at all!
As ever I did go trad climbing loads though so hopefully there’s some entertainment value in here…
Top routes, Peak
Leaf Buttress, Laddow Rocks I love moorland crags and I love crags that were more popular in the past than they are now, so Laddow ticks both boxes. Part of my affection for these two crag types is down to my perverted attraction to routes that, while far from impossible, are a struggle way beyond their lowly grade and Laddow ticks that box too. On the face of it it’s a friendly crag but while almost everything there
should be easy, loads of them are scary shit like this, the hardest route in the 1948 guide 8) , a tall VS with an odd off-balance corner to start followed by an exposed crux step off a ledge onto a hanging slab with no worthwhile gear nearby, barely any handholds and no indication that there’s any more gear coming up :???: .
In recent years I would have reversed off at this point (I know this for sure as it’s exactly what I did in 2021) but this time out of the blue the absurd instruction “Mike, if you can do this you will be
a legend in you own mind” :lol: came clearly and unexpectedly into my head and I committed. What a daft business rock climbing is. My partner that day did not share my love of the crag and appears not to have been climbing since.
Scimitar, Tintwistle Knarr Quarry I clean some routes every year. Give something back, etc. but it’s usually stuff on the eastern edges that no one realised was overgrown. This year I decided to sort out the Knarr so I could persuade people to go and climb there with me. The Old Triangle was the route I wanted to do as it’s a Joe Brown route and pictured in On Peak Rock but I couldn’t clean it up in three separate visits so ended up doing other things like this which it turns out are much better.
Everything up there seems tough for the grade even when spotless and this felt more like E1 than that HVS the guides give it- what looks like traversing a hand crack is actually a wild teeter with your tips in a seam and a slap at the end. It was years since I’d yelled at a belayer in stress. :look:
Herford’s Route, The Pagoda, Kinder Scout Me and my road dog Gazzy B had been talking about how we’d barely climbed on any of the crags in the Jacob’s Ladder corner of Kinder so this June we went up there and did a route on each of them in a cool little tour. This banger is another one that was the hardest in the guide in the distant past and is also the highest climb in altitude terms in the Peak 8) 8) . It’s one of those grit routes where you progress up a series of rounded breaks via mantels and each time you get to the next one you find it’s far more flaring than you thought and takes the size of cam you’ve already run out of. Fuck knows what Herford was playing at when he did it with no gear whatsoever.
If you read the comments on UKC you’ll learn that there’s a flaring crack at the top that baffles lots of people who decide it’s not part of the route and just traverse off. What those cheats don’t realise is that the crux is
after it. A passing walker was so impressed by our ascent that she scrambled up the back of the buttress to take our photo, much to her boyfriend’s bemusement.
Ashop Crack, Ashop Edge, Kinder Scout This side of Kinder is the biggest and arguably best day out in the Peak. Ashop Crack must be unique in that it’s had every grade from Severe to E2 in its history. The three current guides all give it a different grade! Basically it’s fairly easy climbing at the beginning, a little harder at the end but with a hanging #5-sized offwidth (knee jam/ hand-fist stacks sort of width) crux section inbetween. I was winched up this bit by Graeme “I don’t remember why I insisted that it wasn’t given more than HVS in the BMC book” Hammond in 2020 but had loads of confidence this time as I’ve far more wide crack experience, strength and range of motion now, plus you always have that “I’ll just push the big cam up above me” feeling with offwidths :yes: .
Upon throwing myself into it it became immediately clear that moving the big cam up with me was not going to happen and a good few minutes of grunting, cursing, dry-heaving and scrabbling for unseen foot ripples ensued with Reeve doing that thing where your belayer’s encouraging you but you can hear in their voice that they expect you to fall off any second :look: . Topped-out into the blinding sunshine and belayed in a very cheerful mood looking out across to Bleaklow.
Top routes, not Peak
Herford’s Crack, Clogwyn y Tarw, Ogwen Another Herford route, done a few weeks after the Kinder one by both him and me. It’s a splitter of the type you don’t find many of in Britain and gets HVS but that probably takes into account that Eryri-based climbers don’t have many pure cracks to practice on and hardly any Brits have more than one of any size of cam. Fuck knows what Herford was playing at when he did it with no gear whatsoever. I took tons ;D.
It’s really really good and not every climb has to be high in the grade. I did this with my other half belaying on an amazing day in June (in a wet year we had dry weather on both of our booked-long-in-advance weeks in the mountains!) before we scrambled up Tryfan.
Front Line, St. Govan’s Head, Pembroke Sea Cliffs just felt like a workplace to me after making The Seaside (I think you’re supposed to feel jealous when people post shots of lovely places on social media with the caption “today’s office” but that’s not the effect it has on me) and the thought of climbing somewhere like Pembroke filled me with terror after injury made me a timid and useless climber, so this was my first trip to the coast for climbing since 2015 and we headed to St. Govan’s as soon as we got down there.
Although I’m alright at it again now the Pembroke style is still a bit outside my comfort zone but this one (crawl onto a ledge, climb a corner crack, traverse into a longer corner crack then chimney out of the top) was within my “wheelhouse” and it was great, even though I puttered it up by climbing in a sweatshirt, getting really sweaty and taking ages repeatedly working out which wires would fit :slap: . After leading this and seconding a couple of harder routes I was pretty much done for the whole trip!
Top spankings
The Bulger, Roaches Lower Tier In 2022 I got my arse handed to me every time I climbed in Staffordshire and I ended my entry in this section of that thread with “2023 will be my year over there”. As it turned out I only climbed there a few times and did have success (Delstree would be in the Best Of bit if I had a story to tell about it) but I also failed on this for the second year running. Like a lot of the Lower Tier this is firmly in the category of lower grade sandbags that I just said that I enjoy and is a style I feel at home on usually but the Roaches Lower is just such a cruel mistress :spank: Back on for another “warm up” on it at some point this year no doubt though.
Hollow Earth, Trowbarrow Got PTSD from this whole wall because it has lots in common with the wall I had my accident on but particularly melted down on this one for some reason :'( .
The Whistler, Gowbarrow Stayed in the north east Lakes in September at a cottage with no Wi-Fi and very little phone signal which was great. I started climbing with my other half in the mountains this year which was also unexpectedly good but required seeking out single-pitch routes as she belays me but doesn’t second. Turns out quite a few of the crags in the region we were in fit this criteria which was ideal. This little crag has a high quality HS too that was fun even in the very humid conditions and a beautiful view of Ullswater from the top.
So far, so not-a-spanking. But wait! Where’s the upper tier with the three star E1? Seems the approach details in the book are out of date and a rockfall has destroyed the scramble approach meaning a non-Rache-friendly abseil in is the only option. This story would be way better if I’d have made her do it and second the pitch anyway but I’m not like that so instead I tried my hand at this dreadful route that neighbours the HS. Starts with an awkward, chossy unprotected roof above a big bramble pit :sick: . Did that, got some gear in ready for the moves up and out of the groove that guards the amble to the belay tree. Fuck me they’re hard. Also soily. If I weight the rope I’ll have to do the bottom again but it can’t be as hard as it looks. It is as hard as it looks. Lowered off ready to strip it but got that “I was pathetic, I just needed to try harder” feeling so did the horrible start again and committed FULLY to the move. Fell off. Fuck this. On abseil found that there’d been some sort sort of rockfall and while the move I couldn’t do (even off the ab rope) was indeed the last hard one, above was a groove of pure soil with pieces of unattached rock wedged in it. Not going back.
Birch Tree Wall Variant/ Lean Man’s Superdirect, Black Rocks I got what my possibly expired Covid tests told me wasn’t Covid but certainly felt like it in July and it took it right out of me right when I was climbing really well. I was keen to get back into it and did what I always chide others for doing- went climbing when I wasn’t really recovered. We ended up at Black Rocks for some reason, a crag where I’ve done literally everything that’s gentle loads of times so I attempted these
two and had an absolute ‘mare on both, terrified, out of breath, coughing fits mid-route etc. I am not a naturally confident climber and tend towards thinking I’m too rubbish to do the routes I want to do. This set my head back for long after my health had recovered.
